April « 2008 « Death Chic

Archive for April, 2008

Mission: Idiotic

2008
04.30

Posted in deployment, family, mortuary school | No Comments »

I love being a student. Especially a mortuary school student. Not only do I get to attend classes in the Winchester Mystery Trailer but I suspect I may be one of only a handful of people throughout the country who can legitimately incorporate photos from rotten dot com into a class assignment.

Yesterday I was finishing up a project on putrefaction and an accompanying visual aid which - I’m quite proud to report – was adequately disgusting, when it became apparent that I was going to need some crafty-type stuff to get the photos and cards to stick to the poster board the way I wanted.

That’s when I went to Joann’s. You know, the crafty-type store with lots of gingham and fake flowers and cutesy pink ribbony things that attract hordes of uptight soccer moms who never get laid or use the word “fuck”?

Yeah. That store. Oh boy do they love me there.

So I go. And I have to say that there is nothing more fun than cruising down aisles filled with muffy moms comparing puff paints while I search for glue with which I can affix photos of bloated, drowned, and dried-out corpses.

Good times… especially if you could have been in my head.

For a few minutes I actually felt like I was on an undercover mission. A mission in search of crafty contraban and the staff at Joann’s had been specifically instructed to be on the lookout for student morticians in order to apprehend us before we breached their perimeter. And the other customers would be in on it too; if it was discovered that I had in fact gotten past the crack team manning the cash registers the customers would provide a secondary line of defense in order to prevent me from defiling their zots or glue sticks with my dark and disturbing crafting. Maybe they would trip me in the scrapbooking section or try to waylay me at an end-cap dedicated to felting.

…and now I totally lost my train of thought because my dad just called in the middle of me writing this post to tell me that despite the fact that the Army licked a stamp and sent him via priority mail, he has managed to travel for five days without actually being dumped off in Afghanistan yet. At this point I’m not sure who’s worse in the reliability department: the government or Delta Airlines.

“So where are you then?”

“Turk-ij-is-tanople?”

“Dad, that’s not a country.”

“Manna-fanna-stan?”

“Sounds like the name game.”

“Turk-a-jerk-my-chain-is-stan?”

“Now you’re just being silly.”

“Ok, I give up. I don’t know what country we’re in. I don’t know what time zone we’re in. I don’t even know what my name is.”

“Well at least you’re in the section with countries that end in -stan.”

“True. Hey, wanna burqa? They’re super cheap here. Wave a few American dollar bills and the women practically fly out of them.”

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I want to make out with Phil Knight…

2008
04.26

Posted in fitness, running | No Comments »

…just for starting a company that makes this:

The most fabulous-o running accessory like, ever

This, my friends, is the Nike Running Skort, or – as I like to call it – several yards of fabric that distinguish me from the legions of female runners who look like they entered the world as William or Bill or Mack or Buddy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

As a few of my long-time readers may already know I have spent the last several years rehabbing a hamstring injury and personally? I can’t come up with a better way to celebrate convalescence than to go out and hurt myself again. So I’ve hit the road and in doing so I have re-discovered that the biggest obstacle to my enjoyment of this sport is not the crappy energy bars, race day Port-A-Potty lines, squeezing in two-hour runs, an irrational fear of Gu, or even being run over and bloodied by Kenyans.

My biggest problem is finding running clothes that don’t make me look like a dude.

So you’ll have to excuse me for using this blog entry to lay some love on Nike. It is only because some ~~enterprising~~ ~~capitalistic~~ kind, benevolent soul on their research and development team thought I know! Let’s make women’s apparel look, like, feminine and stuff! that I can now shimmy into a running skort and let the world know I’m proud to be a chick instead of schlepping down the road looking like some pre-op tranny.

…not that there’s anything wrong with that.

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Paging Dr. Spock…pick up a white courtesy telephone

2008
04.24

Posted in family, parenting | No Comments »

So LL e-mailed a link to an CNN article involving the need to explain death to children and the inherent perils involved in those conversations.

As a parent - particularly as one who is pursuing a career in the funeral industry - these questions come up in my household frequently. I do my best to answer but it’s delicate ground and difficult to know how to set my kids on a path toward acceptance (even if it is a reluctant acceptance) of death without needlessly scaring them. I want to be honest, but how much can you divulge before your kids become overloaded? How do you put a child’s mind at ease regarding a topic that most adults refuse to cope with?

For instance, last night my son and I were in Target when, out of the blue, he began asking me questions. The problem is that because of the career path I have chosen the boy has already tackled and compartmentalized the easy questions regarding funerals and how we treat the bodies of our loved ones when they die and has since moved on to the more existential end of things. He asks me stuff like:

What makes us move and talk and think made of and what happens to it when we die? Can it die too? Is this what our spirit is?

- I tell him that our faith teaches us that we do have an immortal soul that persists after death.

What does heaven look like?

- I have maintained that I don’t know. Now, if you really want to frighten an eight year old then simply concede that you don’t know something, especially where it involves death. I still wrestle with this one because it’s the truth; I don’t know. Still, the notion that his mom doesn’t have all the answers has caused the poor kid a lot of stress.

Will we see your Gramma Springer when we get there?

- No, she’s probably somewhere else. (Ok, I kid, I don’t really tell him that.)(Miss you Gramma.)

Who’s going to take care of me when you die?

- I remember being about his age and having an overwhelming fear of my parents dying, so when he asks I drop everything and give him my full attention before assuring him that I’m not going to die for a long, long time and he won’t die for a long time after that.

Are you sad that you’re going to die someday?

- I also try to explain that while I’m not skipping for joy at the inevitability of my own death I have learned to accept it and use that eventuality as motivation to live as good a life as I can.

Can we control our own spirit?

- The question about being able to control our own spirit is getting a lot of play in our household these days. My son is preoccupied with the notion that he will die and his soul will fall into the hands of a malfeasant supernatural being that will use him to hurt others. I have tried to pry the source of this idea out of him and have been left with nothing more than a suspicion that he’s heard about Paris Hilton’s latest heap of garbage. Then I remind him that our faith teaches us that there isn’t some beastly supernatural being lying in wait to snatch our souls.

If Papa and Gramma are in heaven then why are we sad?

- Because we miss them. Just because death is normal and natural doesn’t mean that we don’t sorely miss those who have died before us and feel the pain of their absence.

…and the questions go on and on and on and rarely stop before I’ve had hours during which I regret ever entertaining the notion that I was equal to the task of this parenting thing. However, in between the time that the questions start and my kids are satisfied that they have intellectually bloodied me, they seem to have picked up something that I hope will serve them well when considering their own mortality; the concept of continuity and their place in the larger scheme of things.

At the age of eight I think my son is just starting to grasp the notion that he is but the latest link in a long chain that stretches into the past behind every one of us:

“Mom. Maybe it won’t be so bad since your Gramma Springer is there with daddy’s papa and gramma and they can be with us when we die.”

Then he asked if I would buy him a candybar and promplty forgot about the whole thing. And I realized that maybe I should stop worrying so much about ruining my children.

“We won’t be going in there alone… I meant my ancestors. I will call into the past, far back to the beginning of time, and beg them to come and help me… at the judgement. I will reach back and draw them into me. And they must come, for at this moment, I am the whole reason they have existed at all.”

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Ye ask and ye shall receive…

2008
04.20

Posted in blogging, friends, medical care, memes, mortuary school | No Comments »

…or perhaps this post should be titled, “This is the post that results when my readers e-mail to tell me what they want, what they really, really, want.”

First of all, let’s give a hand to Barrister Mobutu Sese-Seko. I, for one, truly appreciate him taking time out of his horrendously busy schedule bilking old people for their pension checks to help tie up a few loose ends around here concerning Those Hit Generating Schemes That Shall Not Be Named. So thank you Barrister, may you have long life and health in whatever third world hellhole you are practicing your art of scammery from.

Secondly! This is where I answer this guy’s and this other guy’s questions about the tuberculosis. Yes, I was really, truly, actually exposed to TB. I’m taking pills for it until September (originally my doc recommended nine months but recently reduced my sentence to six.) No alcohol, processed cheeses, raw sushi, aspirin, hookers, Malawi nationals or anything more fun than red flavored Jell-O until I’m done with the meds.

You read that right. No alcohol. And it’s only April. Don’t come near me or I’ll stomp on your toes.

Thirdly, I can’t be the only participant in the 2008 Northern California Invitational Celebrity Death Prognostication Challenge who was absolutely pissed to read this.

Fourthly, I would like to publicly thank Blondie for sending me a link for a local freelance job writing web copy for a Davis-based company that makes eco-friendly burial containers. I submitted my resume last week and if I somehow manage to land the contract I’m sooo sending you a bottle of wine.

Fifthly, I would like to whore Jay out. Again. Just because he whores me out so much and I fear a breach in our informal mutual pimping agreement might result in bad juju.

Sixthly, I would like to thank Cranky Prof for being so cranky. And professorial. I love you. And your blog.

Seventhly, an update on the funeral sciences program. Life has been busy on the back forty of American River College where the FSE headquarters are housed in the Winchester Mystery Trailer. We’ve quizzed. We’ve tested. We’ve grilled our professors for gory details about stuff like purge, skin slip, and anal leakage. We’ve covered areas of the funeral business in deliciously gruesome detail that makes the Faces of Death people look like amateurs.

…we’ve even moved bodies around. Ok, not real bodies… fake ones. Like the mortician’s equivalent to those plastic dummies that you practice CPR on.

Classes have been great, especially considering that I’ve spent the entire semester sitting next to the Men of Mortuaries calendar boy Mr. February. No joke.

So anyway, Mr. February is an apprentice embalmer in San Francisco and has more good death industry stories than you could shake a dismembered arm at. Oh, and he also does a mean cha-cha with our program’s permanent resident, Senor Esqueleto:

Need I say more? This semester’s been the best time I’ve had in school since starting Kindergarten as a wee Death Lass.

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Dear Body

2008
04.05

Posted in blogging, fitness, friends, memes | No Comments »

Ok, so first off I should apologize to Lori for being so late in getting this out. She was the one who had originally suggested I post a letter to my body as part of a larger BlogHer thing and then I was the one who said “Sounds great!” and didn’t do it and didn’t do it, and then? Didn’t do it some more.

So here you go Lori, although I think I’m going to let this post stand alone and outside of the whole BlogHer thing.

Dear Body,

Hey, how’s it going? Pretty good I hope? Things are going pretty well here too, but I guess you already knew that.

So, um, anyway. I was kind of hoping to tell you thanks. You know, for like, seeing me through the last 34 years. I mean, it would probably have been easier for you when – during that last stint in Mexico – we were faced with a dozen beers and horse-killing amounts of tequila to simply say “forget it” but you didn’t. (Not to say you didn’t exact your revenge the next day as I spent several hours dragging you by your forearms to the bathroom while wishing I was dead, but in the end you decided to keep the lights on and let me live to see another day even though I probably didn’t deserve it. Viva la gringa indeed.)

Uh… yeah. So thanks for not killing me back then. Also, thanks for not quitting on me throughout the many abuses I’ve heaped on you over the years. Like that time in college when I wrecked my motorcyle in the middle of Fair Oaks Boulevard. Yeah, if I were you (which I am, kind of) I’d be pretty pissed about the fact that I managed to pitch you over the handlebars and get you run over by my then-unmanned bike. At least you and I were able to get the number of that nice waiter who ran out of Piatti’s to help you get out of the street.

Thanks too, for putting up with my dumb ass during those college years when I experimented with stuff that – as my friend Denise often said – “was made in people’s bathrooms”. I shudder when think back to all the chemical garbage I subjected you to even as I’m simultaneously relieved to have a justification for having spent those years as a registered Democrat.

You know what I’m most grateful for body? You’re energy levels, your strength, and your ability to endure.

You sustained two pregnancies and let me keep running well into the second trimester both times. You delivered two healthy and happy babies with nary a complaint and then gave me the energy to tend to them. Your ability to replicate yourself within my children is something that gives me pause whenever I see my son’s blue eyes or comb my hands through my daughter’s impossibly thick blond hair.

You have completed eighteen mile “fun runs” and pushed your way up Hurricane Point. You never seem to mind slopping around in 10 kilometers worth of mud. Sometimes you object when I drag you into a one-hundred-and-five degree room for yoga, but only a little.

Body, you have been patient with me in every endeavor I have undertaken whether it be diving into the ocean, throwing myself out of an airplane or hiking up the back of Half Dome.

I am very lucky to have you. You have not betrayed me by developing cancer, debilitating diseases or other chronic ailments. You have equipped me with the energy to properly care for and enjoy my family. I have eyes that see, ears that hear, and a mind that works tolerably well (depending on which of my family or friends you’re asking.) Sure, there was that time you threw in a hamstring injury for giggles but now that that’s over I think we can be friends again.

I have to say that after 34 years I’ve got no complaints.

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